2002A&A...383..813L

The metal line profiles of different ions observed in high HI column density systems [N(HI)>10¹⁶cm^–2] in quasar spectra can be used to constrain the ionization structure and kinematic characteristics of the absorbers. For these purposes, a modified Monte Carlo Inversion (MCI) procedure was applied to the study of three absorption systems in the spectrum of the HDF-South quasar J2233-606 obtained with the UVES spectrograph at the VLT/Kueyen telescope. The MCI does not confirm variations of metal abundances within separate systems which were discussed in the literature. Instead, we found that an assumption of a homogeneous metal content and a unique photoionizing background is sufficient to describe the observed complex metal profiles. It was also found that the linear size L and the line-of-sight velocity dispersion σ_v measured within the absorbers obey a scaling relation, namely, σ_v increases with increasing L, and that metal abundance is inversely proportional to the linear size of the system: the highest metallicity was measured in the system with the smallest L.